… or for the building to crash down around our ears, anyway. My office is located at the most exposed end of the building, and when it’s very windy (like today), things shake and rattle and it sounds like the roof is coming off.

I’m also waiting for the snow to start; the forecasters have promised quite a bit for later today, continuing overnight and tomorrow. I already drove through a few sprinkles on the way to work this morning, and I expect I’ll be driving through significantly heavier showers on the way home tonight. Ugh.

… after watching a BBC Wales programme called Rugby: Poetry in Motion (thanks to BBC iPlayer). Five Welsh poets were commissioned to write poems about the positions in a rugby team (rugby union, of course); they spoke about them for the camera, and the poems were read over footage of the Welsh squad training for the World Cup last year.

It was a lovely programme, combining two of the things I’m most passionate about (with some good background music too), and it made me miss my country very much. How can I not love the fact that I’m from a place which values rugby and poetry equally as art forms?

What’s hiraeth? the non-Welsh among you may wonder. Well, the word doesn’t have a direct translation. It’s sometimes translated as homesickness but that doesn’t sum up the whole feeling of longing and nostalgia that hiraeth encompasses, and that I found myself feeling this evening.

… from Blogger, because I prefer its flexibility and plugins and ease-of-use on my own domain.  I need to tidy up the categories still, but it’s basically done.

… because it’s their annual Birdwatch this weekend, where they ask people to spend an hour watching the birds in their garden or park.
This year, I saw fewer species than usual - no greenfinches or coal tits, and no sign of our resident dunnocks - but I saw greater numbers of the species I did see.

Also today, I am mostly … doing some work

… because I’m starting to get very anxious about our next deadline, and I want to make sure I can get some more of the Author-it conversion done asap. Bah. Not really how I want to spend my Saturday (or Sunday, since I’ll probably be doing more tomorrow) even if it is only a couple of hours a day.

… by Heath Ledger’s death. When I read about it on the BBC news website last night, my first thoughts were that it couldn’t be true, that it was a sick joke or a mistake or…
I could feel reality fracturing; what it really was and what I (and probably so many others) wanted it to be.

He was an actor I liked a lot. 10 Things I Hate About You and A Knight’s Tale are films I’ve watched over and over; I’ve been looking forward to his turn as the Joker in The Dark Knight. And he was truly brilliant in Brokeback Mountain. I’ll miss him as an actor; my sympathies are with his family and friends.

… like it’s going out of fashion. Although I was pretty damn chirpy when I got up this morning (for me on a Monday, anyway), I was knackered by the time I got to work because of the horrors of driving in heavy rain. Which include:
- big puddles on the back roads (six inches deep and worse thanks to the potholes and bad drainage)
- idiots driving too fast through the big puddles
- idiots driving too close behind me
- idiots driving without their headlights on

All that concentration is too much for me on a Monday morning. I hate other drivers. One of my (many) driving instructors once told me to behave as if everyone else on the road is an idiot, and that advice has been very helpful over the years…